Daughter of Dragons

Liad
The Grand Lake Townhouses
Solcintra

In which Lady Kareen is offered an attractive prize at a price she is not willing to pay.

It’s striking, in view of their many differences, that Kareen’s reply to the Department’s offer is so much the same as her son’s.

This is the single largest, if not the only, part of the series to be told from Kareen’s point of view, and offers several clues to how she ended up the way she did. We get her perspective on being abruptly (though not, I think, with anything like deliberate cruelty, for what difference that might have made) downgraded from highly-favored only child to second-place to a kid brother who doesn’t want the preferment she can’t have. It’s also mentioned that she’s been married multiple times; since Korval is not among those clans who find such things a financial necessity, the implication is that it took her several attempts to get Pat Rin, a circumstance which casts light on her relationship with him.

At that, she’s mellowed somewhat since she last appeared, way back in “A Day at the Races”. She’s got more respect for Val Con’s quality as a delm (which probably started then, come to think of it). And she seems better disposed toward Daav than used to be the case; perhaps a quarter-century of his absence has given her room to admit his good points without being constantly reminded of their points of difference. Part of it might be that the unusual nature of recent events have caused her to see things in new lights, the way she’s recently come to find value in Luken bel’Tarda and in Jeeves.

Perhaps, although this seems very unlikely, she’s softening in her age: she’s nearly eighty Standards now, and although that’s not as old for a Liaden as it would be for a Terran, it’s not young.

(It also means that she and Her Nin yo’Vestra have been close for something like fifty or sixty years.)

I don’t think yo’Vestra’s postulated situation actually applies to Korval, which departed its holdings in accordance with a plan agreed to in advance and did in fact notify all its members appropriately; even the one they weren’t sure was still alive got the message, let alone the one yo’Vestra is trying to position as having been abandoned. To be fair, of course, yo’Vestra doesn’t know that Pat Rin was notified, since none of his colleagues have yet had a chance to discuss the matter with Pat Rin — and anyway, that whole question falls to the wayside if no other clan member lives long enough to contradict his proposed account.

Timing: Anthora and Jeeves have already shifted to Jelaza Kazone. yo’Vestra’s remark about having found and then lost Pat Rin suggests that this is after Pat Rin’s encounter on Teriste. That puts it at least three days, and probably a day or two more, after Nova gave the scatter order. Which is not too unreasonable, on consideration, since most of that is probably down to the amount of maneuvring it would take to get five children, including two infants, out of their usual routines and off the planet without anybody noticing where they went.

It’s an interesting detail that one of the things saving Kareen, in the end, is that whatever the lofty personages of Liad might think of Korval, those who are employed by them know them to be dependable and fair in their dealings.


Tomorrow: back to I Dare.

9 thoughts on “Daughter of Dragons

  1. Jami

    Yes, this book explained much about Kareen. I liked it a lot. I read it again today, along with Dragon Tide.
    Did you notice that Jeeves told Anthora he is capable of more than when he was first built? I wanted to know more about that.
    Do you think Scholar yo’Vestra was the council of clans proctor? I couldn’t find it explicit in the text, stating that he was proctor. Maybe it’s in another book.

  2. Paul A. Post author

    I think you mean the protocol officer? (A proctor on Liad is something like a security guard — not an occupation likely for a scholar.) I can see the possibility, but there’s a fairly obvious reason why the protocol officer in I Dare can’t be Scholar yo’Vestra, given that I Dare takes place after this.

  3. Jami

    Yes, you’re right on both counts. But “the protocol officer appointed by the Council of Clans” was indeed among the 12 guests Kareen invited to that fateful meeting. I want to assume he was yo’Vestra — cuz…Council — but the text never states what yo’Vestra’s did, beyond being on this League for Purity of Language. There were also six librarians, a dramliz, an off-world Nadelm, and two people of business.
    So, yo’Vestra could have been the protocol officer, appointed by the CoC, to the Language League, but not the “real” protocol officer for CoC.

  4. Paul A. Post author

    Looking at the guest list afresh, I read it as saying that it includes twelve of Kareen’s fellow Scholars of the Code plus sundry others, with “the protocol officer appointed by the Council of Clans” being clearly delineated as a sundry other along with the people of business and the nadelm and so on. Scholar yo’Vestra, of course, would have been one of the twelve, not a sundry other.

  5. Ed8r

    I don’t think I could have executed someone who had been a friend and compatriot for as many years as yo’Vestra. I would have been paralyzed by disbelief and then waffled long enough to have lost whatever advantage I had. I was amazed, but pleased, to see that Lady Kareen has hidden strengths. I am glad that the series has continued to “redeem” her character as it has.

  6. Ed8r

    As I read this time, I found myself wondering about the wide gulf between Kareen’s organization—League for the Purity of Language—and the work done by her (sister-in-law?) Anne Davis—A Distillation of Professor tel’Bana’s Theory of the Common Root-Tongue—which demonstrates that the language is not purely Liaden! I don’t recall hearing much about this particular rift within the family, only as it caused the enmity of the Terran Party?

  7. Paul A. Post author

    I don’t necessarily see a conflict there. To say that two languages have a common ancestor in the distant past is not to say that they are not separate things in the present. Most of the modern European languages have a distant common ancestor, but they’re separate things, and the real world contains groups like the Académie française, whose aims include “to labor with all the care and diligence possible, to give exact rules to our language”. It publishes the official dictionary of the French language, awards literary prizes, and has other related duties. Dissuading people from using loanwords from other languages (such as “computer” and “email” instead of “ordinateur” and “courriel”) is quite a small part of what it does, though it is a part.

  8. Ed8r

    @Paul: But it seems to say to me that Liadens don’t care whether there is a common root (although we know differently from when it was published) the Terrans are so adamant that they were willing to kill.

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